Commentary: The Difference Between Obamacare and Other Disasters

By Lucia Graves

November 19, 2013

HealthCare.gov has been compared to just about every catastrophe in recent and not-so-recent history: the Iraq War, the Battle of Waterloo, the Challenger disaster, and Hurricane Katrina. You can read those very nuanced smart takes all over the Internet. Here however, we're going to focus on a very important statistic associated with all of these disasters that has been resoundingly ignored: how many people actually died.

The New York Times in a 1,000-plus-word story by Michael Shear compared Obamacare's botched rollout to Hurricane Katrina. One thing he leaves out: 1,833 people died during Hurricane Katrina.

Duke professor Henry Petroski, writing in the New York Daily News, compared it to the 1986 explosion of the space shuttle Challenger. That killed seven.

Capitol Hill Blue's Callie Moran wondered whether the website rollout is Obama's Waterloo. Not sure if this affects the calculus, but more than 47,000 people died there.

To give those numbers some perspective: So far the biggest casualty of the catastrophic unmitigated government failure known as HealthCare.gov has been more than 106,000 people signing up for health insurance.